Her Mother's Smile by Hudson Aimless

     Naeen raised the photograph until it was at exactly the same level as the scene outside the weathered windowglass. Her black eyes darted back and forth between the structures outside and those in the picture, seeking out the elements on the buildings that remained - how they had weathered since the picture had been taken, how the facades of the storefronts had changed. And beyond these, the shops as they once stood on her street, tall and graceful structures, clean and bright buildings. None of these remained. And to judge from that picture alone one would have thought the whole world was in color back then. She turned it over to look at the handwritten inscription on the back: 14th street, 1997, August. It was the oldest she had ever seen upclose.

     Naeen had found two other documents under the carpet that she pulled up, in addition to the peephole. She had taken her prized knife, methodically sharpened, and cut into the rug's thick, synthetic fibers before pulling it from it's moorings of glue and tacks. And she saw them there. One was a postcard of a park, wonderfully green. She had put this up on the wall where she had painted a picture of her mother hovering above a broken car. Her mother was smiling. Why she would be smiling at a broken car made little sense, but the image of her smile was comforting to Naeen. In many other places on that wall and on the other walls Naeen had also painted or drawn pictures of her mother, always smiling. They were based on a photograph. In the photograph her mother is smiling.

     The other curious thing that Naeen found was a pricetag of some sort, with a small string hanging from one end of it. This she lay on the wardrobe before hobbling back to the corner and kneeling down again on the bare floor by the still radiator. The hole wasn't much larger than the thumb on her right hand but was an unobstructed view into the apartment below hers and she decided to watch it for a while. She watched for six hours until the woman who lived there returned.

     The woman closed the door softly and came and lay on the bed, staring up at the rotting ceiling, up unknowingly at the black eye sitting every so still in Naeen's sallow face. And then she - the woman, who's frame was slight and small and whose skin was white like ash - rolled over and began to cry terribly. And so Naeen decided to draw a small picture above the sink, not of her mother, but of the woman. Only, in the finished drawing the woman would be smiling.

     The door thundered. Naeen placed the black chalk on the remaining half of the mantle and edge her way toward the door. She had been standing, drawing, and her leg had gone numb, heavier that much more from the crude metal brace she was forced to wear to steady it. They banged on the door again and plaster dust jumped from the jamb, the hinges yielding almost imperceptibly to the power of their fists.

     "Just put it under the fucking door!" She yelled at them. She was sifting through a pile of clothes, hoping to find a shirt. It was warm and she was naked above the waist. Her skin was yellow, like rabbit-skin glue, and her stomach faintly round, a teardrop curve of femininity that signaled her entry into womanhood. She held her scarred left arm over her small breasts as she dug.

     "Nielssohn wants we should get a look at you!" And they pounded again. The lock groaned.

     "Go the fuck away!" She was hysterical now. They had never come like this, rarely ever more than one of them and never with such abject disrespect. The pounding stopped. A moment of quiet; she looked up, lowered her arm. Then she heard a metal slipping sound, like an iron tongue running gently over steel teeth. The door opened and they had her, tightly gripped. Her leg fell away underneath her in her brief struggle. They lifted her by her arms, pulled her head around by her hair. They stunk of fetid smoke and their arms were covered in course hair, their hands of draped with tough skin.

     "Listen you fucking bitch," began one while the other pushed a wad of money past her lips, "Nielssohn says you're going to have to start earning. No more free ride. He's coming himself next time. Says he's gonna get you working or else put you on the line."

     In unison they threw her to the floor where she covered her nakedness with both her arms.

     "And you won't make much on the line, I don't guess." His foot tapped her brace. A moment of quiet again. She could sense them looking around.

     "What in the name of fuck?" The other said, awestruck by the mural of images.

     The first reached down and stripped a few bills from the wad, wet with saliva, and shoved them into his pocket. "'Cause I'm such a gentleman and I don't take up his offers to have a taste." And they withdrew. The bolt on the door clicked as they closed it. Another moment of silence.

     It was evening and Naeen was pushing her full basket toward the elevator bank. The walls were covered in crude graffiti, little of which impressed her at all. The door opened on the street and she could feel the rush of cool air drift down the dark corridor. Instinctively she felt for her prized knife, which she kept inside her brace when outside her room, but the footfalls were too soft and steady to encourage her fear. The dark figure waited besides her for the elevator, voicing only a soft exhale from time to time.

     When the elevator arrived it cast a moving beam of light through the port-hole window on its door. Naeen and the stranger caught each other's eyes; sized each other up in the wan electric spill. The figure offered a small smile and then helped open the door fully. Naeen was uneasy with the figure with whom she had grown so intimate from afar. They moved into the small elevator, one after another. Naeen negotiated her basket in first; the woman followed. She had only a simple paper bag, stained with grease. A small sack from the bakery. They rode in silence until the fourth story, where the elevator notoriously suffered. Together they stepped out to climb the stairs and reclaim it on the fifth floor where it again could ride normally with passengers.

     Naeen moved terribly slowly up the stairs as she had to first rest her basket on the step before manually adjusting her mangled leg upward. In the dark she went even more slowly, more carefully. The woman had climbed the flight long before Naeen had gone halfway. Cresting the last set of stairs Naeen could see the woman standing, waiting, with the door to the elevator cabin wide open. She smiled her small smile again. And spoke.

     "I'm sorry I didn't offer to help. I'm very tired, I'm not thinking well."

     Candlewhite helped Naeen with her packages into the room and then stood, rooted to the threshold, frightened by the images that adorned every wall. Lit from the amber bulb above the sink the faces were haunting. Women smiled sickly, men stared down with crooked grimaces.

     "I have soup here, and sausage that I just purchased. You're hungry?" Naeen asked. The blue vein in Candlewhite's neck pulsed. "Then come inside and lock the door. No reason to be afraid of me."

     Candlewhite closed the door and threw the bolt. The room was small. A bed in one corner, a desk littered with boxes of chalks and crayons, paintbrushes scattered across the floor. In the corner the carpeting had been rather violently pulled up from around the radiator. Her nose flared at the sweet scent of the soup as it started to heat. Her stomach tightened into a fist and she felt unsteady. The pictures on the walls floated around her like phantoms. She took a step back and collapsed onto the bed, her chest crushingly heavy.

     Naeen paid the her little attention and unwrapped a large sausage and placed it on a board. She grabbed her prized knife and sharpened it quickly against the worn whetstone before cutting the plump sausage lengthwise with a single, effortless motion. Then she dropped it dismissively in a smoking pan above the rusted hotplate. It began to sizzle immediately and fill the room with its seductive smell.

     Naeen began to quickly draw a small picture of the collapsed Candlewhite on one of the few undecorated sections of the wall. Her eyes were rolled back in her head but Naeen choose to center the irises and add a playful smile in spite of the truth.

     She had been given the name Candlewhite by her teacher, who had told her to throw everything else away, and she had. She had thrown away her past and her family. She had thrown away her youth and her innocence. Under his tutelage she had thrown away five years hoping to grasp a rare harmony available to only the most enlightened, to attain a peacefulness, to embody healing. It had alluded her. Forsaken her. Left her abandoned, nearly destitute. Afterwhich she came to New York City in hopes of finding employment. She had once been a dancer. She had once been a healer. The city needed few dancers but in the dank dancehalls and few healers but in the back rooms of those same seedy spaces.

     The sole lamp that burned above the sink threw little light across the floor where they sat drinking cups of tea. Between them a plate held a small stack of crackers and the last smudges of sausage grease. A siren blared past the window. The police car passing quickly, throwing red and green streaks across the ceiling. Naeen's dark eyes were perfectly still.

     The only job she had been offered was as a prostitute and she had steadfastly refused Nielssohn's insulting offers, his demand that he 'test the waters.' They had refused her at the factories because they had been told to. They refused her in the shops, averting their eyes in shame and sending her back into the street. It had already been decided that she would suffer until she agreed to his terms. Men, women and children eventually agreed to his terms.

     Naeen tried to stand but her leg, casually unbraced, could not hold her weight and she winced terribly. Candlewhite reached for her, helped her up and over to the bed.

     "Can you bring the pot from the corner?"

     Candlewhite stepped to the corner, near the door, and carried the metal pot back to the bed and sat it between the girl's legs. Naeen raised her skirt above her hips and thrust herself forward, lowered her center over the mouth of the pot and began to urinate. Candlewhite stared at the girl's twisted limb. Her lame leg was a blatant mass of disfigured flesh, angrily marbled like the walls of the room with ghostly images in pinkish flesh, scissored with purple scars where she had been patched together. Candlewhite stepped forward and kneeled in front of the girl. She placed a soft hand on Naeen's foot, ran it up to behind the crude joint and back again.

     Naeen's eyes were still.

     Naeen's father never knew her. Or, rather, she never knew him. Or who he was, is. She had always presumed him dead, playing to the odds. Her mother had been a waitress at a restaurant and had been dark and proud, with hair that caught the glint of the moon and lips the color of plums. She had been killed one summer night by a local thug, brutally beaten and pushed, with her young daughter, into the street, into the path of a car that swept them both up into it's metal chest. And he had felt little remorse for crushing her silvery light until he was told that the daughter had not died. He had an envelope delivered to the hospital where she lay. And another three months later. Never enough for Naeen to leave the building or the city, just enough to suffer a little longer.

     Candlewhite ran just the very tips of her fingers from the base of the girl's neck and across the soft bumps of her spine to the small of her back. She extended her sinuous arms out and lay them over the girl's legs, one perfect and somber, the other troubled and raw. She closed her eyes and inhaled through her dark nostrils, drawing up into herself everything she could, stretching out her fingers, wishing for the energy to cascade out of her limbs, to bleed out and over the side of the bed. Enveloping Naeen into herself she eased the girl onto her side and then onto her back. The thrust of marred skin jutted up above Naeen's hip like a ripple of wine on her side before it swarmed her arm in violent clouds of purple tissue, bulging and swaying over the broken bands of muscle beneath. Candlewhite placed her soft cheek on the arm and traced its path back and forth, hearing its troubled form.

     Finally, exhausted, she lay down next to Naeen and breathed slowly, softly, endlessly into the girl's ear. The room felt warm, limp.

     "Are you asleep?" Candlewhite asked quietly, careful not to disturb the air.

     Naeen did not respond but instead rolled over to face her. She craned her neck and placed her lips against Candlewhite's ear and began to whisper.

     When the pounding began on the door this time it opened without hesitation. Behind him the two men stood smoking, surprised. But Nielssohn only smiled at the sight of Candlewhite. If there was a question on his lips it was well hidden.

     "You're not the little freak I was expecting," he said with effortless calm. Candlewhite shook her head. He was tall and lean and the tension of his skin, pulled taut around the wiry bands of muscle of his body was unnerving, as if he might tear in two during a moment of furor.

     "I'm telling you, this is where she was - look at that fucking place," said one of the men, gesturing at the drawings on the walls. His eyes disinterested, he reached out and shoved the man back.

     "You're disappointed?" Candlewhite asked, stepping back into the room and letting the sunlight gather around herself.

     Nielssohn stepped forward, looking around at the grimly decorated room with the well-draped bed in the corner. The two men started to step in but Candlewhite raised her hand at them, her eyes locked on Nielssohn.

     "I believe we have some business to discuss."

     And he sent them to the street, to buy him cigarettes, to track down the money someone owed him, to threaten the Italian butcher one last time, to cut off a finger if need be. And to come back in an hour. With his car. The door shut silently and he pulled out a thin cigarette and lit it. The smoke was dense and green and smelled of juniper.

     She had managed to remove herself from the room and saw the events that happened there cast in shades of blue. The touches to her skin she was able to dull .The touches within were distant throbs, phantom feelings from an amputated hollow. Only the sounds were beyond her control. The wet slippings of their movement and the harsh utterances that he offered her in encouragement; these she could taste fully in all their bitter vibrancy.

     He took a seat on the bed and kicked his worn leather boots from his rough, naked feet and instructed her to undress in front of him. She moved slowly across the room, removing first her soft, black slacks and draping them over the handle of the door, the back of her naked legs elongated for his view. With a glancing heat, she could feel his eyes travel from the slim heels of her feet up, across her well-turned calves to the swell of her ass, digging into the neat valley there like anxious fingers.

     Without catching his eyes she stepped to the window where the streaming light gathered in the folds of her thin, white shirt, pooling under her small breasts and over the field of her stomach. Her neck was flour-white and her hands drifted sing-song over the buttons, undoing first the top one and then the next down until the shirt lay still and undone. Nielssohn sat up on the bed. She peeled the two halves back like a bird extending its wings and let it flutter behind her as she came towards him, raising a leg onto the bed and nestling his rough chin in the cleft of her bare sex.

     His appetite, she soon found out, was voracious and crude, consuming her as a hungry jackal might strip the meat from a carcass. Where his fingers went first, his mouth soon followed. When he had groped and tasted her sufficiently he attacked her unyeildingly with his narrow, taut organ, never seeming any closer to climax, to completion or exhaustion.

     He had been behind her, driving into her, grunting audibly, the flesh of her hips twisting under the torque of his strong hands. And then he let go of her and she collapsed on the bed, her eyes swimming in the blue mist of her vision, her lungs surging in her chest. She rolled to her side, half-ready to concede defeat. He was looking at her with an air of disgust and he reached into the pile that was his discarded clothes and removed another cigarette and lit it. He stood over her, legs astride and his erect cock unwavering above her. She felt he would destroy her if she did not act.

     She could sense a tapping. She reached up, between his legs and raised herself on her elbows, bringing all the wetness she could gather to consume his slick, impossibly warm object. He smiled down at her and her fingers, nestled at the joint of his legs, could feel a sense of relaxation. She explored him there and found his person soften. Soon she had him sitting and then laying on the ragged bed, her mouth never wavering from the prescription. And her fingers continued to seek him out, moving farther within.

     She picked a thick paintbrush from the floor and slowly eased its blunt handle inside him. Her legs were now draped over his, her sex exposed to his, her spine a tight, fluid arc. She nestled closer, trying to insert the filthy bristles of the brush into herself as she continued to hold him as deep in her mouth as possible. She scooted forward and he groaned with pleasure, draping first his arms, and then his shoulders over the side of the bed.

     The bristles were rough, coated in dry, hard paint and they scraped at her. Still, she rocked herself forward, pushing him further along, further impaling herself. He could feel her wincing, could feel the growing discomfort and disgust and this, she was sure, was adding to his pleasure.

     With the bristles well deep in her nest, she began pumping her hips forward, fucking both of them. Her pace quickened and with each rutting motion she pushed him further down the length of the bed. Her mouth suckled the head of his member, her hands pumping him, feeling the flesh tighten across his stomach and groin. She was fucking him with fury and he slumped further off the bed, his hips arced now, his arms extended on the dirty floor. His eyes were closed tight, and from his mouth came a ribbon of gruff voicings. She could feel the energy within him surging toward her with frightening speed. His back went rigid and his long body became a curve from head to toe, her throat impaled on the apex. His head was upside down with the crown flat on the floor, his neck a red bursting snake.

     Naeen reached her two arms out from under the bed where she had hidden herself and with the lame one grabbed a lock of his hair. The healthy one drew her prized knife across the tight skin of his throat with three quick bowing motions, each tearing artery and esophagus, leaving ribbons of flesh dangling to either side. The scream that erupted from his mouth was breathy and bubbly and beautiful. He began to thrash. She slashed him again and again and again and Candlewhite let him roll off of the bed, a pile of white limbs on the floor, whipping this way and that.

     His blood flowed at a tremendous rate and for the few moments before he died he was sliding around in it, trying to right himself, to seek help He scratched at the wooden floors, tearing nails from his fingers, desperate to find purchase. He reached up for the bedding and pulled that into the pool of death along with him The blood was blacker and thicker than Candlewhite had expected it would be and it, too, gave off a hint of juniper.

     Naeen watched him from under the bed and caught his eyes when he began to give up, when his body settled down into a series of fascinating twitches. She was sure that he recognized her. What he was thinking, she couldn't tell, his face growing too still and too cold to read. She would get up in a minute and put the other sausage into the pan and make some tea. Then, she thought, perhaps she would paint over a section of wall, perhaps even over one of the pictures of her mother. She would paint a portrait of Nielssohn, a fallen rag in a pool of red. And she give him a subtle smile, she thought, because she preferred it that way.